We have hated our kitchen since day 1. The first time my husband took me to see the house when it was for sale I said “No thank you. That kitchen is horrible.”
Here’s the before.
The fact is that it is actually a good size, has plenty of cabinets and the set up is nice. I just hate everything else. We knew we’d eventually start working on it and recently decided we couldn’t wait any longer. We had a hard time deciding if we should just replace all the cabinets (problem being they are actually super nice wood cabinets), having them professionally painted, or painting them ourselves. Finally deciding we would paint them ourselves we needed to decide with what. Chalk, fusion mineral, or just latex. I’ve painted with chalk and fusion mineral and we didn’t love the finish of either and knew we’d hate it on the cabinets so after much research we went with latex. Here’s my step by step.
First thing you have to do is take a picture of your current cabinets and label all the doors so you know where they go when you put them back up. I used an app for it and used letters for the upper cabinets and numbers for the lower cabinets. Then when I took off the doors I wrote the letter or number inside the hinge or on the back of the door with a pen. (inside the hinge wasn’t painted, the back of the doors I used painters tape and just flipped it side to side when painting)
Second thing you need to do is remove all the doors. We had decided to paint the frames with a brush and spray the doors with a paint sprayer so we needed to remove all the doors. We were able to unscrew all the drawer faces so we didn’t have to remove the contents of those which was amazing! Also make sure to remove ALL the hinges.
Third is wash time! We used the following 2 items:
Use TSP Substitute first (make sure to wear gloves) // Then Jasco Liquid Sander (I found mine at Lowes) here is a similar product: Liquid Sander
Now it’s time to tape and lay out all your doors. We used the following items:
Then we were ready to prime. We picked this primer from Lowes:
We used these brushes and roller from Amazon:
The primer dried really fast and we were able to get both sides of the doors and drawers and the frames of the cabinets all done in a day.
The next day we put on the first coat of paint on the frames and the backs of the doors/drawers. We picked Benjamin-Moore Chelsea Gray for our color and used Sherwin Williams paint from Lowes. On the frames we used the rollers and brushes shown above and for the doors and drawers we used a sprayer.
We ended up doing 2 coats of paint on everything. Waiting overnight in between coats. We did both coats on the backs first before turning over and doing the fronts.
We then let the cabinets “cure” for 4 days before re-hanging them and adding hardware. I choose the following hardware from Wayfair.
Wayfair Basics Cabinet 3 3/4″ Center Bar Pull
Wayfair Basics Cabinet 3″ Center Cup Pull
My husband used this template to install:
The finished product:
A few take-aways:
It isn’t perfect. I knew doing it ourselves it wouldn’t be but I am still very happy with the end result. We have 2 lazy susan cupboards and took the doors off both, I would recommend not doing that next time. They were awful to get back on and in the process got scratched.
We are nervous that the cabinets will chip. They haven’t yet but I am being extremely careful. I am sure they will and I’ll probably cry when it happens but I am still happy we decided to paint.
The paint sprayer isn’t perfect. I definitely liked the look of the sprayer more than the roller or the brush but sometimes it shot out paint chunks. Can anyone else see them? Probably not if they aren’t looking for them but I can.
Also, it was a ton of work, time and so much patience. It was also EXTREMELY affordable. We were able to borrow the paint sprayer but with everything else I linked it was under $250. (including hardware)
NEXT UP: Countertops, backsplash, removing the cabinet above the coffee maker and inserting floating shelves and new appliances. Stay tuned for the next update and feel free to ask me any questions!
~Julie
